Interview with James Edward Gray II

Hi, it’s Mike again with UGtastic. I’m sitting down with James Edward Gray, who is known for Shades of Grey, the Ruby Rogues, and also if you’ve used his faster CSV library in 1.8, and now it’s part of the standard lib in Ruby 1.9, not, well, just Ruby 1.9. But thanks for taking a moment to sit down, James. I appreciate it. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved with Ruby? Yeah, it was a long time ago. I think I entered the community in summer of 2004 or something like that, and I’d just kind of gotten off of a job and, you know, went into that cycle of learning new things, and I grabbed a copy of the programming Ruby and decided I’d teach myself a new language and kind of got stuck and never left. What were you doing before Ruby? I’m Java certified. I did that for several years. I spent a lot of time in the Perl community working there. The project I came off of just before getting into the Ruby community was a big Perl site using CGI and all kinds of crazy stuff. So you’ve kind of really embraced the Ruby community, and it seems to have been a lot of fun for you. What was it about Ruby? It was pretty early on, because 2004 was, I mean, it hadn’t just come out, but that was pre-rails. Yeah, it was really early. It was easy to get hooked in the community back then. It was a very small, tight-knit group of people. We had basically one mailing list where most of our communication happened, and you would literally be posting questions and getting answers from people like Dave Thomas and stuff like that. Yeah, it was really early. It was easy to get hooked in the community back then. It was a very small, tight-knit group of people. We had basically one mailing list where most of our communication happened, and you would literally be posting questions and getting answers from people like Dave Thomas and stuff like that. So I was just on the tail end of that era, and got kind of sucked in that way. Okay. And then you created the Faster CSV library. What drove that? It was an accident, actually. They were talking on the Ruby core mailing list about how the CSV library was so slow, and people were trying to analyze why it was slow. Really, it was… It wasn’t any particular fault of the library so much, just that it did a lot of work in a really tight loop, calling a bunch of methods and stuff, which in Ruby is pretty slow. And people were talking about ways to speed it up, and just a few weeks before that, I had read Mastering Regular Exp ression or something like that. Right. And so I said, well, you can do it with one regular expression. And everybody’s like, no, you can’t. And so I went and pulled it out of the book and put it in the mailing list discussion, and a bunch of people threw really nasty examples at it that it didn’t handle well. So I kept tweaking it and tweaking it to seeing if I could get it to do all of it, and I wrote this kind of tiny parser using primarily that one expression. And then a few other things to handle some gnarly edge cases, and that actually ended up being the faster CSV core for a long time. Eventually, somebody came along and rewr ote the parser not to use a regular expression, but that was the start of it. Yeah. And then, I mean, what was the process that went from being an external Ruby gem to being part of the standard lib? What did you have… Did you have to pay a fee? Did you have to sign a license agreement? Yeah, yeah, sign away all my… No, actually, there was discussion once faster CSV had been around for a while. There was discussion multiple times about, you know, should we replace the library and the standard core? And I think most people were positive to the idea in that, you know, we wanted a faster library and stuff. And, you know, we didn’t want to break backwards compatibility. And I had a compatibility mode where it would behave like CSV, but it wasn’t perfect. There were some cases where it couldn’t do the right thing. So that was discussed for a long time, and nobody ever really came to a decision on that, which stalled it getting in. I was tired of it not being in there and wrote a pretty imp assioned plea to, you know, this is ridiculous. We have a much better choice. Can we just put it in? And they were decided… At that point, it was discussed one more time, and it was decided, all right, compatibility be damned. We ‘ll just switch over. Yeah. Well, I remember upgrading from standard CSV to faster CSV and then migrating to 1.9 and had no problems. I mean, but then again, maybe our case wasn’t that exotic. 1.9 was actually kind of a hurdle because when I brought it in, 1.9 had the M17n engine, right? So it had to be rework ed extensively because of encodings, which encoding, you know, your data is in matters how you find things like a quote and a comma, right? 1.9 was actually kind of a hurdle because when I brought it in, 1.9 had the M17n engine, right? So it had to be rework ed extensively because when I brought it in, 1.9 had the M17 n engine, right? Yeah, we actually drove some bug fixes in Ruby at that time . When I was fixing CSV, I would figure out a lot of encoding stuff, and I would find some kind of bizarre edge cases and then post them to the list, and that actually ended up fixing certain bugs in Ruby. Oh, okay. So because you were actually driving a use case for a lot of these encoding issues. 1.9 was actually kind of a hurdle because when I brought it in, 1.9 had the M17n engine, right? So it had to be rework ed extensively because when I brought it in, 1.9 had the M17 n engine, right? Yeah, so because you were actually driving a use case for a lot of these encoding issues. And that drove me crazy, so I wrote those articles that you mentioned on my blog. And so you’re jumping over to some of the more social aspects, not just the code, but the Ruby Rogues. You’re on there. You’re a regular contributor to the Ruby Rogues podcast. How did you get involved with that? I’d had an idea from some other podcasts I listened to that had panel discussions, and I thought, man, it’d be really cool. Wouldn’t it be cool to do that in Ruby someday? And I guess Chuck had had pretty much the same idea, and I can’t remember who mentioned it first, but one of us mentioned it on Twitter. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a panel of Ruby discussions, and whichever one didn’t mention it, the other one was like , I’ve been thinking the same thing. And so we kind of started trading some emails over it and put together the original panel and just started doing it. And it was just something we did for fun in our spare time. But then it got popular pretty quick, really. And so we got lots of feedback, you know, your audio sucks, and things like that. Yeah, I hope eventually to get that kind of feedback. Right, yeah. Because I’ll be like, yeah, they all suck. Yeah, when you get a bunch of listeners, they definitely bug you about it quick. Yeah. And, you know, we had some people leave and some people come in, and then we just kind of got lucky in getting a team that really gelled eventually, you know, and played well off of each other. And I think that’s mostly what led to its success. Yeah, I listened to quite a few, and Ruby 5 and Ruby Rogues are two that I can tolerate listening to in the background. Because sometimes it’s almost like listening a little bit to, like, I used to listen to talk radio. And the banter, it’s not too heavy, but, you know, you can kind of tune it out, and it’s like a conversation in the background. Right. But it’s fun. And that kind of is going to provide my segue into the next topic is I joked with Avdi when I interviewed him about what kind of was the impetus for me to reach out to him was listening to the episode, and it was just this kind of ban ter you guys were having. In the beginning of the show about stand-up chairs, stand- up desks. And I was like, I didn’t know at the time that you, you know, you were in a wheelchair. And somebody said something about a stand-up desk, and you said something like, oh, I don’t use one, and I don’t know who it said. But they’re like, well, why, James? And, you know, and then you guys all laughed. And, you know, and I said to Avdi that that’s, you know, that’s a very. Positive banter because you can’t just have that one unless you guys were all friends and knew each other well. But it is germane to the technical community and being out and speaking and going to user groups and conferences and things like that. Has that been something that’s, well, what has it been like ? I hate that question, but what has it been like going to conferences? In a wheelchair? It’s not, you know, it’s not too bad. There was some time early when I was first in the Ruby community. You know, it was a very small group, so I was probably the first one in a wheelchair in the community. And there, just at that time, there wasn’t awareness. And there, so they would just book conferences in certain locations without thinking about things. Like accessibility. And there were a couple of early instances where some of the conferences were not in good accessible locations. And that wasn’t anybody’s fault. Like I said, it was just a lack of awareness. And when it was brought up, you know, everybody felt terrible and all of that. But being in the community pretty early on, that made everybody kind of start putting it as a bullet point. On things you need to look for in a conference location, you know. And so that problem resolved itself really quickly, actually. And really, the harder part for me is just, it’s not easy to travel with a big electric wheelchair. Especially if you’re going to take a plane. It’s very inconvenient. So when I fly, I switch to a manual wheelchair, which is much easier to get around with. When you’re flying. But at the same time, it reduces my mobility a lot. So because of that, I just don’t tend to go to a lot of far away conferences unless I make it a very special thing and do. So I tend to stick to the conferences around me. And I live basically right in the middle of the U.S. So I usually do the more central conferences. And so I don’t get out to some of the big ones on the coast very often, though. So, you know, Josh Susser keeps threatening to drag me to Goguruko. And I would like to make it there someday. But every now and then, I’ll make a special exception. I went to Japan for Ruby Taigi one time. But when going there, then I was traveling internationally. So you had things like, you know, how is the accessibility in Japan to consider. So I talked to Matt beforehand, and we had a discussion. And he told me it was really pretty good in Japan’s modern cities. So to stay in the big, nice cities, but, you know, to avoid the little towns, which is pretty similar to here in the U. S., actually. So I stayed in big places like Kyoto and Tokyo and did that . And then just recently, this last year, I attended Aloha Ruby Conf. So I flew down to Hawaii and did that. And it was a great time. Yeah. So it is something that you communicate to organizers. Hey, if you’re going to have me come speak, just heads up. Well, nowadays, I don’t really have to do that anymore. You know, it seems to just, it’s something we think about now. And I’ve seen other people in wheelchairs at conferences now. So, you know, we’re a big, sprawling, worldly community that needs to be aware of everybody’s needs. So, and luckily, the good thing is, you know, once you reach a certain point, we’re a huge community. You know, Ruby Conf limits the attendance and still gets 800 to 1,000, you know. So when you have to put that many people in a place, you typically need a very modern hotel or convention center. And those kinds of places are always accessible. Yeah, they’ve already got that handled. Right. Yeah, because… It is interesting that as I’m doing these interviews, I’m learning more about people’s experiences in a community that aren’t necessarily young, white males. Right. But even young, white male, like yourself, you know, there ‘s all different varieties of ability and accessibility. So it’s kind of been interesting for me. I actually didn’t come from the .NET. I mean, I can’t… I came from a .NET community for 10 years and then started into Ruby. But in the last few years, it seems like it has grown. There’s been some serious pains with isms in the community. But it seems like we’re coming out on the other side of that with a much more enlightened community or the birth p angs of an enlightened community. And it’s kind of interesting that it’s not been something that’s been enforced from the outside or a government mandate or some kind of regulation. It’s been largely grassroots, the people in the community saying, hey, this is not acceptable or, hey, this has to be better. Yeah, I think that’s really improving. I mean, like I said, I think now anybody who plans a Ruby conference is, you know, at least factors it into their thinking, you know, it should be accessible. You know, I have people tell me things like, we’d love to get you to come out to our conference sometimes. Oh, and I’ve checked. There’s a ramp to get on stage, right? You know. Yeah. Things like that, you know. So I think it’s in people’s minds now and they factor it into their thinking. And just attending the conferences, I’m noticing how much more diverse they’re getting. And, yeah, that makes me really proud of us as a community. So, you know, a lot of people in the Ruby community seem to be also, it has hit a certain stage where a lot of the, it seems like a lot of the earlier people who adopted it are now starting to look at other technologies. Is there anything for James? Are you looking at Clojure or anything like that? I play with lots of other things. You know, Erlang I’ve played with quite a bit. I haven’t got around to Clojure or Scala yet, but they’re on my list, you know, to get to eventually. Actually, in recent years, I’ve been more trying to focus on complementary things. Like, you know, a lot of people have been trying to focus on complementary things. A lot of people will go learn Clojure and, you know, use that a bunch. But I’ve been trying to do things like, I actually sat down at one point and finally sat down and learned Bash, you know, the shell. I just, you know, all those years I could use it a little, but never really sat down and read through a book on it and learned how to write loops in it or things like that. And, boy, that was phenomenal for my productivity. Like, I can’t tell. I can’t tell you how valuable it was, actually. I mean, I understand now when a process works, what’s going on, you know, and what are the rules. And it’s funny how much that helps. And so I’ve been learning more complementary things. I’m a big regular expression nut, and I enjoy digging down into the guts of Aniruma and building really complicated regular expressions to understand how the engine works and things. So I’ve been focusing more on complementary things. So I’ve been focusing more on complementary stuff and less on totally, you know, I’m going to switch to this other language kind of stuff. So you’re going to come up with a Bash quiz book? No, I don’t think my Bash is that good. You need to talk to somebody like Wayne Siegwin for that. He’s really great at that kind of stuff. Yeah, and so just to kind of bring us to the tail end, you ‘ve written a few books. But the one that was kind of the most interesting for me was the Ruby quiz. I’ve not actually read it formally. I’ve sat down and looked through it. But it was interesting that it was more of like, here’s some kind of neat things that maybe you wouldn’t expect. And what was the impetus for creating that book? So when I came to the Ruby community, I came from the Perl community. And about the only thing I missed from Perl was Perl had Perl’s quiz of the week back then running. And it was run by Mark Jason Dominus. And it was a little different from the Ruby quiz. It had like a beginner’s level and then expert level each week and stuff. But I really missed doing that quiz and seeing all the solutions and stuff like that. So I created the Ruby quiz to fill that void because I missed it. And I ran it for quite a while. I can’t remember how long. And Dave Thomas. At that time was, you know, really getting that pragmatic bookshelf going. And that was when they started producing a lot of Ruby books. And he came to me and said, would you like to take some of the best of the Ruby quizzes and turn them into a book? Okay. So that was how it happened. And he admitted at the time, he’s all, you know, it probably won’t be a great seller, you know, because it’s kind of a niche thing and stuff. But he said that, you know, it’s a neat topic and will be something fun to have. And the line ups. Yeah, it was always on the shelves at any of the consult ancies I was at. But it’s 1.8. Is there an update coming for 1.9? No, they recently took that book out of print. So I think it’s all done. I did the Ruby quiz for three years and then kind of set it aside. It was a huge time commitment because, you know, you had to have problems ready to go. And I wrote the problem each week. And then also I had to, as problems came in, I had to dig through the code enough that I could figure it out and talk about it, you know. So that took me some time. And then I wrote up the summary each week. So all in all, it took me about eight hours a week, I would say, to just run it and sometimes more. It was a complicated problem or something. So eventually I was like, this is a lot of fun, but I’m going to have to set this aside if I’m going to be able to do other things. And there have been some people who’ve ran brief stints in the interim, but nothing like the original run. Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down and chat with me. So thank you very much. You have a good day. Absolutely. Thanks.